Chicagoland… and around the world

CCS Banners

I did some architectural photography for CCS International through the Maclyn Group agency. Maclyn turned my images into giant banners for CCS to use at trade shows and other events.

Works- v5

The latest copies of our promotional magazine have arrived from the printer and are ready to go out the door. The Works is always a fun thing to put together. Even in this age of Instagram and endless digital files, it’s exciting to produce a nice printed piece that people can actually hold in their hands. This issue of The Works has some documentary farm photography from North & South Carolina. Plus there are some portraits, and even a selection of images from a very cool factory photoshoot we haven’t shared with anyone yet. I’ll get to that in the blog soon…I promise!

Awesome Engineers

We run into so many different types of people, doing jobs that we didn’t even know existed before we started working on a particular project. And occasionally we meet a group that really seem to enjoy what they do, like the crew we photographed at the engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates. As far as I could tell, these people are doing what might be described as “extreme engineering.” They spend their days breaking things, or stressing structures until they collapse. They are bending beams, cracking concrete, and grinding down rusty bits of metal.

If someone else’s structure falls apart, they are sent in to figure out why, and how to fix it. When the Washington Monument cracked after the DC earthquake a few years ago, they were the team called in to repair it. Walking around their facility we saw people working on sections of twisted metal, and others looking at the composition of various concretes on a microscopic level. At some point we enquired about a giant structure we saw in their parking lot. “Oh, that’s a section of a bridge that was collapsing in downstate Illinois. They put it on a truck and brought it up here.” Bridge in the parking lot? Totally normal. The photos we took for WJE will be used on their website and on some internal pieces. Hopefully we’ll get to climb up a few buildings for them in the future.

Italy

After venturing away from the coast of Italy, I got the chance to explore some of the little towns and villages that dot the countryside. This beautiful bridge in Bassano del Grappa was the site of some heavy fighting during WWII, and the walls of the surrounding buildings still have the the bullet scars to prove it. Asolo is a quaint little mountain town, with stores that always seem to be closed. My only time to shop was around lunch time, and that seemed to be when things shut down for a few hours. The main street is two directions, but it is so skinny there is a stop light at either end of town that lets cars take turns going in and out. I’m hanging out the window of a second floor restaurant to bring this photo to you. These last two photos are from wine country- the scenic village of Valdobbiadene. We ducked into a little cafe on a hill while the rain passed through. The cafe served three different kinds of horse, and a donkey stew. I decided to go with the chicken.